Chapter 4 #2
I TRIED TO WORK OUT THE DEPTH OF MY SADNESS.
I KNEW I FELT something—some rawness behind my eyes, some pressing weight that made it hard to breathe.
Wasn’t this grief? But I couldn’t decide whether it was a genuine grief, or if I was feeling sad because I was supposed to feel sad.
I could not easily recall the details of my gonggong’s face.
I could not tell grief and guilt apart. They sat the same way on my chest.
I was also trying to work out the extent of my loss.
It was not immediate: I had not seen my gonggong or popo in years.
They had lived with us in Boston, once upon a time.
They had come over shortly before Flora was born and stayed until she was old enough for preschool.
But then, for reasons unexplained to us at the time, my parents decided this living arrangement was not working anymore, and my grandparents returned to Guangzhou.
We had visited some summers when we were children, but then those summer trips became shorter, spread farther apart.
Flora had summer camp. Jasmine hated the long flights.
Over the years, our conversations had dwindled to video calls over WeChat.
My mother always initiated those calls. I didn’t have my grandparents’ WeChat numbers.
It would have been so easy to figure it out and establish a direct line of contact to my grandparents, and yet I had refused to do it.
The extra steps involved—asking my mother for their contact information; adding them; using Google Translate to type out some filial platitudes in Chinese, for we had nothing else to talk about—seemed like insurmountable obstacles.
My mother was the conduit to her parents; we spoke only when she’d set up the connection.
I dreaded those calls. They felt so staged.
They weren’t conversations but scripted rituals.
We always did them around holidays, when everyone was home from school, and always after dinner, when it was late in the morning in China.
My mother would position me at the center of the table and pronounce in loud, overenunciated Chinese what I was supposed to say before I repeated it:
Gonggong, Popo, hello! How have you been?
Happy New Year! Wishing you good health and happiness!
I am doing great in school. I am studying very hard.
I have been accepted to Yale. Yes, Yale University! No, in New Haven.
Once Gonggong exclaimed, “Lily’s gotten chubby!
” I was a junior in high school then; I had just learned about eating disorders and was researching how to give myself one.
After we hung up, I wailed to my mother, “How does he know I’m fat?
How can he tell from just my face?” My mother explained that it was a compliment, that it only meant that Gonggong thought I was growing up, flourishing.
But I didn’t believe her, and I refused to show my face on WeChat for the next six months.
I knew my sisters also hated these calls, because we were always so eager to hand the phone off to the others. Love you. Love you very much. Here is An-An. Here is Guai-Guai!
We couldn’t defend our antipathy. We loved our grandparents; we had only the fondest memories of them.
We just couldn’t bear the static. Not seeing them at all was better than this fuzzy, inadequate connection, which only reinforced the distance between us.
The last time they had spoken to us, meaningfully spoken to us, we had been children.
Now we were verbally arrested, even worse at Chinese than we had been at three, four, and five, and unable to do anything but echo those childish refrains.
Gonggong, Popo, hello! It’s me! I’m good.
I’m very good. I’m studying hard. Yes, I’ve eaten.
Wishing you good health. Here’s Mom, now. Bye-bye.
But I had meant to fix this. I had the perfect plan.
I would study Chinese in college, become fluent in short order, and then I would have all the conversations with my grandparents that I had avoided before.
In my imagination, my grandparents would always be there, frozen at the age that I had last seen them, waiting until I was ready to talk.
I thought I’d get a second chance. I thought I had the time.
The last time I had spoken to Gonggong was in March, when I was home over spring break.
Jasmine was out somewhere, and Flora was still at school, and so my mother corralled me to perform the WeChat call on my own.
Gonggong and Popo had moved to a smaller apartment by then, and they had a home health aide, A Zhu, who crouched beside them and held the phone up to their faces so they could see.
They didn’t react when I spoke. I realized they couldn’t hear me.
I had to repeat myself several times, each time painfully aware of the slippage in my tones.
A Zhu repeated everything I said in her own dialect-inflected Mandarin, shouting into Gonggong’s ear until finally he nodded.
Popo gave no sign of comprehension. She had suffered a stroke the previous year, and her smile sagged so that she wore a constant grimace, as if even the sight of us put her in pain.
After ten minutes of this, A Zhu said that it was time for their nap, and they hung up.
The screen went dark. I sat there a moment in silence with my mother.
“They’re getting old,” I said.
My mom sniffled. I glanced over and saw her eyes were red.
“Yes.” She stood up. “That’s what parents do.”
I WASN’T GOING TO THE FUNERAL BECAUSE I COULDN’T GET INTO mainland China, because I didn’t have a valid visa.
It would not have been difficult for me to obtain a visa.
I had been in and out of the mainland plenty of times throughout my childhood.
At some point, we all held multientry tourism visas.
But my passport had expired when I turned eighteen, and this invalidated my visa too, and renewing it involved taking my picture and filling out forms and standing in line at a Chinese consulate, the closest of which was hours away in New York.
Back in January, after I had been accepted to the program, my mother had suggested I visit the mainland after my time in Taiwan.
Taiwan didn’t require visas from American citizens, but the mainland did.
I’d agreed to look into it. But then the spring semester began, and I had to worry about my classes, and then I had to worry about midterms. And then the semester ended, and one month before the trip I didn’t have time anymore to apply because then I would have to relinquish my passport, but because so many people wanted to go overseas in the summer, there was a backlog, and the consulate websites could not promise when I would get my passport back, so there would be a chance I couldn’t get into Taiwan either.
I could have scrounged up the fee for an expedited visa, but the expediting process required you to go to a consulate in person, and I didn’t have time to take the train to New York to wait all day for a visa because it was finals, and my ticket home was the morning after my last exam.
I could tell my mother was frustrated, that she felt this proved I did not prioritize my extended family.
But she didn’t insist. We could go next summer; we would plan better.
But now it was too late and there was no point, and there would be no more summers, and I was a shitty granddaughter who couldn’t be bothered to fill out some forms, and it didn’t matter if I got a visa next year, because I would never make it in time to see my gonggong ever again.
ANNA HAD RETURNED BY THE TIME I GOT BACK TO THE APARTMENT. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with Margrit, eating takeout dumplings on the coffee table. I opened the door, and they both lowered their chopsticks.
“Hi, Lily.” Anna stood up. This was a strange move, given how tiny our apartment was. There was nowhere for her to go.
“Um, hi.” We were speaking in English, so I knew what to expect: bitchy Anna.
“Hi, Lily.” Margrit gave me a little wave.
I ignored her. To Anna I said, “You didn’t come back last night.”
“Ah.” She shrugged. “Yeah.”
“I got worried.”
“Did you?”
“I texted you.”
“I was fine,” said Anna. “It got late. I crashed at Margrit’s.”
This did not make sense to me because Margrit lived in one of the university dormitories, which was twice as far from the bar as our apartment. I figured that whatever Anna had spoken to JC about, it had made her angrier with me, but that was not a puzzle I could untangle now.
“Anyways,” said Anna, “I’m glad I caught you. I think it’s about time we have a chat about our living arrangements.” She cleared her throat. “You’ve had the apartment to yourself for a few days, so I think it’s fair that I should have the space back for a bit.”
“What?”
“Come on,” said Anna. “Don’t act so surprised.”
But I hadn’t been acting surprised. I was genuinely surprised, and I had said “what” because I wanted her to repeat what she had said.
I was having tremendous difficulty processing any speech acts.
In Thought and Society, I had just learned this chengyu: 牛頭不對馬嘴, “the mouth of a horse doesn’t fit the head of a cow.
” It referred to incongruity, such as when the reply didn’t fit the question, or when two people talked past each other.
It was all I could think about now. I overlaid the image of a cow over Anna’s face and saw its lips moving instead of hers.